ABSTRACT
This chapter shows, on the one hand, that the question of originality is as old as the human concern with artistic expression, and, on the other, that it cannot simply be laid to rest by stressing the production modes of modern audio-visual media. It demonstrates that some central literary models become testing grounds for contemporary adaptation and the theories that accompany them. Two famous linchpins of Fidelity Criticism in European culture, William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, will appear as touchstones, but also as interrelated discursive reference points of the debate. The chapter shifts from general cultural and literary questions to those of adaptation between media and its contemporary critics. Reader-response criticism has pointed out the productive uncertainties in meaning that are the real triggers of interpretation. Tradition leads us to the final aspect in which adaptation enters a problematic relation with the idea of fidelity: interpretation.
